Why your copy might well cost more than your site

"But how can writing the copy for a website cost this much?" the gentleman on the other end of my phone asked. "We spent less than this on having the site built."

Well here's your answer, matey.

Your site has nothing to it, and would have required only a modicum of skill to build it. Its design is virtually templated. Its entire coding would have taken an averagely capable developer a day and a half at most. It's an empty shell, like a blank canvas before the painting is executed on it, or 100 minutes of celluloid before a movie is filmed on it.

Your copy, however, will take time and require thought, experience and craft to complete.

Where 24 separate pages of your site are created by a couple of lines of code from one .php page, the content for those 24 pages must be written individually, with care taken to put across the right message the right way on each.

The success or otherwise of your copy will determine whether your visitors can find their way around your site and feel they can be bothered to do so.

It will govern whether they like you, listen to you and, in the end, decide to do business with you.

In a nutshell, the value of your completed site lies in what it says and how it says it, rather than in the framework in which you sit the messaging.

And unless a site has particularly sophisticated technologies operating behind it in order to achieve remarkable advantages for your business model, this will always be the case.

Comments

[Matt Ambrose]

JPEGS and HTML tables don't sell things. Words do.

Discovered your blog on technorati and looking forward to reading more of your insight.

[Peter Maughan]

Lawrence, I don't think that answer can be enlarged upon or bettered. You leave the rest of us well armed indeed if it ever gets to be our turn.
My thanks for it.
Peter

[will atkinson]

Well said (written?) Lawrence.

[Rob]

Too bloody right!!!